Well, we made it home. Thursday, all domestic flights out of Heathrow were canceled but the trans-Atlantic flights were still making it off the ground. Although, there was about an hour delay. We thought that getting out of England was going to be the hard part. We landed and were going to have a very short lay over, almost not enough of a lay over. We arrived at our departing gate at Dulles in D.C. at 5:00 for our 5:30 flight. We get to the gate to find out it's delayed until 6:40. All the flights had delays, one of United's major hubs, Denver, was closed. Okay, we find a place to grab a snack and something to drink. At 6:00, I can barely discern some announcement about our flight, we pay and leave the bar. On our way back to the gate, we see on the departure board that our flight has had a gate change, but is still delayed until 6:40. Just to be sure, Mark heads to the gate and I head to United information right behind us. At information, I'm told the flight is still going out of the same gate and start heading toward said gate. Mark calls, "get to the gate as fast as you can, something is screwed up." I run. I'm almost there when I see Mark running toward me, he snatches the tickets out of my hand and is heading back toward the United desk again. Apparently, our flight left at 6:15 from the original gate, even though the departure board, in sight of the information desk, still had the flight listed at delayed until 6:41 with a gate change notice. We were given standby tickets for the last flight, scheduled for a 9:30 departure, but delayed until 10:30. Odds were, we weren't going to get on that flight. In line behind us were a couple of other people in the same situation. We decided to all rent a car together and drive to Pittsburgh from D.C. and hit the road around 7:30. Linda, the one woman says in a sing song movie intro voice, "Four strangers meet at an airport and decide it's a better idea to drive than wait out the next flight..." This was the right decision. We arrived home late on Thursday night, without our luggage, which had been on the flight that left without us. We arrived home to the house decorated for the holidays, groceries in the fridge, sheets freshly washed, the heat turned on and Greenbean waiting for us... All care of Mark's mom. After such a long day of travel, we had been awake for almost 24 hours at this point, with the relief of being home again, I had a nice little cleansing cry full of home sickness. It's good to be home and it's going to be strange to leave for good on the first.